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towards the "public interest", bureaucrats engage in rent-seeking behaviour that hinders rather than helps. There is said to be an asymmetrical information bias between politicians and the bureaucracy. Some have hypothesised that senior public servants often know how much it will cost to implement a particular policy, but nevertheless avoid disclosing accurate figures. This is because civil servants are interested in maximising their discretionary budgets by seeking a larger appropriation than necessary. An increase in discretionary budgets is postulated to be linked to higher salaries and more perks. Hence, a normative conclusion of public choice is that well-intentioned politicians must take care to avoid falling victim to self-interested pleas for additional funding, by insisting rigorous cost-benefit analyses are carried out.

Third, public choice literally forces us to think twice before placing faith in government's capacity to solve problems. Friedrich Hayek, in his essay entitled "The Use of Knowledge in Society", argues that politicians and bureaucrats who plan programs lack necessary "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place" (p. 524). Local information that is crucial for successful implementation of policy is only reliably available to private citizens on the ground. For this reason, it is suggested, many government policies do not achieve their intended objectives as legislators are not aware of all relevant events affecting the topics on which they cast a vote, and nor do they possess perfect knowledge in an epistemological sense. This lends support to the perception that a small, less interventionist government is preferable.

Several criticisms of public choice have been put forward. Some have argued that it is based on faulty assumptions - it is too sweeping to claim human beings are always rationally self-interested. Others take the view that public choice models are too simplistic to be of use: they do not take into account other relevant factors and their scope is limited to that which can be quantified. It would seem however, that these critiques are relevant only to the extent that public choice is inconsistent with the facts of a particular situation. Overall, public choice has been extremely valuable in dispelling the naive belief that governments pursue the public interest.

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